Lithys 2018: Transamerica - Digital Design Excellence

Lithys 2018: Transamerica - Digital Design Excellence

Transamerica Logo 1024-512.jpgCompany: Transamerica

Company background: Transamerica is a 114-year-old B2B financial services company, focusing on retirement, insurance and investment products and services. Shaking the last 3 decades of traditional marketing efforts and growth by acquisition, our team decided in 2016 that our brand needed a do-over. This time, we would focus on our customers and become a purpose-driven brand.

In 2018, Transamerica launched its new brand identity: Wealth + Health. Our aim is to educate and empower consumers about the interconnected nature of their financial and health habits. Alongside our new brand, the Transamerica team launched a new digital ecosystem encompassing 5 new platforms.

Contact: Janice James

Title: Community Manager

Related URLs: https://community.wealthmeethealth.com


Lithy category: Digital Design Excellence

1. What are your digital goals? And how does your community platform and/or social media management platform support your overarching brand experience?

Our digital goal was to create a thematically branded, easily customizable, responsive design that can provide an impressive user experience no matter what device our customers are using. We achieved that by implementing 3 different sets of agile considerations:

Thematical cohesiveness

Our objective was to create a consistent experience for all users no matter what part of our ecosystem you are on. To achieve that, we paid meticulous attention to color, styling, font and user journeys, constantly focusing on the question “Where are our customers going to next?”

Component-based design

Additionally, to support a seamless transition from one property to the next, we made sure we used an iterative process to create all our designs. Thus, creating components for each functionality and feature, while continuously comparing wireframes for all platforms within the ecosystem, and standardizing treatment across all user journeys.

Navigation

This ultimately led us to a standardized UX and to a global navigation system in the header and the footer of each platform within the Wealth + Health ecosystem. Our goal to tell a story without breaking your movement across all brand platforms was achieved by creating numerous crossing options from one website to another.

2. What design elements make your community/website/social channels unique and stand out from the rest?

In our first iteration of the community (launched April 2017), we focused on the functionalities of the community that we, as community managers felt needed to be highlighted. But we found that this did not serve our members needs’ well. The objective of our redesign in early 2018 was to find a design that would visually tell our brand’s value proposition as well as actively integrate user-generated stories (content) with the community members’ journey within our ecosystem.

 We felt, that to achieve this experience, it was important to make the purpose of our community clear to all visitors at first glance. We did this by focusing our “above the fold” or more importantly the “first scroll” real-estate of our website on the following functionalities: 

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  • Global navigation (header and footer) treatment across the ecosystem for a seamless transition between platforms.
  • Prominent Hero Tile CTA section on the community homepage that focuses on three elements of the community:
    1. The value proposition of this community and the benefits of being a member
    2. Registration call to action
    3. Participation call to action
  • Topical navigation through tile treatment on the homepage for easier exploration of the community. 

We also developed a featured area on the homepage (below the fold) that highlights both curated (by the community manager) and user-generated content with equal weight in the Recent Content section on the community.

3. How did you execute your design? Share metrics to prove the success of your design excellence (e.g. visitor increase, kudos increase, social engagement increase, number of posts and mobile traffic)

We started planning the first design of our community in October 2016 and launched the MVP (minimum viable product) community in April 2017. While we worked within an iterative process, our efforts were hindered by an ever-changing brand style guide, which was being developed simultaneously with our community and knowledge place platforms.

This first version of the community was launched after internal and external testing with employees and customers, and receiving feedback. 6 months after the launch, our UX team completed the style and UX guidelines for our company, which in turn kicked off a new process. This 2nd iteration of all platforms focused on overhauling the design and functionality of the Wealth + Health Community, the Knowledge Place, redesigning the W+H app and consolidating our 150 corporate domains.

With a finished style guide, our UX team set out to design wireframes and widgets that can be used with a plug and play process across all platforms. In this agile and iterative process, the team developed a library of functionalities, spent time testing them in the market for usability and functionality shortcomings with customers and ultimately rolling it out on owned platforms for consistency.

We faced some unique challenges for community functionalities as not all treatment and capability could be translated one to one between our website CMS and the Lithium community platform. Establishing great collaboration between our UX team and our Lithium development team, ultimately all widgets received identical or near identical execution no matter what CMS is feeding it. Our ecosystem spans across Lithium for our community, Tridion CMS for our website and Knowledge Place and Ionic CMS for the W+H app.

4. Share metrics to prove the success of your design excellence (e.g. visitor increase, kudos increase, social engagement increase, number of posts and mobile traffic)?

The updated sites launched to coincide with the kick off of the Wealth + Health brand campaign on Friday, February 2nd, 2018.

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To date, year over year[1], we’ve experienced a mean increase in the following areas: 

Our average click-through rate on the homepage hovers between 0.1% to 0.5% for the content section. The revamped homepage (above the fold) functionalities and elements as described in Q3 have yielded increased click patterns:

  1. Global Navigation 2.3% to 25%, with the Community Homepage button, has the highest share of clicks, followed by the Community Blog section with 8.1% and discussion boards with 2.3%
  2. Hero banner with its 3 elements that have a fairly equal distribution of 2.2% to 2.8% click rates
  3. Topical navigation tiles with a click rate of 2.3%

Comparing these increased click rates, we estimate an increase in efficiency and impact to be between 766% to 2700%[2]

Additional overall metrics that have shown the impact of this new design include (but are not limited to)

  • Mobile traffic increased to 53%
  • 30% increase in member registrations
  • 23% increase in avg. time on page
  • 16% increase in session duration
  • 4% increase in sessions per user

Our design paid a lot of attention to the seamless transfer of customer’s journeys across all platforms within our ecosystem. We feel that our global header and footer navigation have achieved just that. Our initial results show the following data points:

  • Referrals from Transamerica.com (our brand domain) to the community increased by 4,345%
  • Referral sessions from all sources within the ecosystem increased by 68%

[1] All data is based on Google Analytics tagging and traffic monitoring

[2] This calculation is based on the median click value for content 0.3% (0.1+0.5)/2= 0.3 (all calculations exclude the homepage button click pattern as that has less value for content consumption purposes.

5. Supporting visuals: Please include supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. 

 

Transamerica.com Before & After Comparison

Before (left) After (right)Before (left) After (right)

Wealth + Health Community Before & After

 

Before (left) After (right)Before (left) After (right)CX (consumer) App Before & After

Before (left) After (right)Before (left) After (right)

Social Media Cohesiveness

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Comments

Love love love it!  Great break-down of the new strategy and user experience improvements.  

Very cool, need to try that app for sure. Smiley Very Happy

If you do let us know what you think, @alexrothfpv . 😄

 

Thanks for the feedback, @jgurumarketing. 🙂